Tom Fletcher is wrong about climate change: Volume 9

We return now to the continuing saga of the Climate Change Ignorance of Tom Fletcher, alleged British Columbia journalist. In today's episode Tom Fletcher demonstrates again on Twitter that he knows nothing about climate change. One has to wonder at a person who repeatedly shows off about being ignorant of an important subject.

BC Local News: The president of the company behind the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion proposal has backed off earlier remarks in which he suggested he was unsure humans are contributing to climate change.

Ian Anderson of Kinder Morgan; The discussion around climate change is a very important one and there should be no misunderstanding of what I think and what I believe: climate change is real and fossil fuels lead to higher CO2 emissions, which in turn contribute to climate change.

Tom Fletcher holds this story up (appears to be holding it up) as support for some kind of conspiracy theory about the so-called "climate change narrative". This is a sufficiently vague and ambiguous term as to be meaningless but it does suggest a couple of things. Tom Fletcher understands his core audience quite well. He knows that they are ignorant of climate change and that they view it as a trick being playing on them by government or elites. The other thing it demonstrates is that he doesn't understand what skepticism means. If he were to be geniunely skeptical he would bother to learn what it is that scientists are really doing. But, that would be too much. Probably high school science would be too much.

Here is another image of the same tweet showing a couple of jokers playing along, encouraged by the apparent acceptance of someone who they assume knows something. There is another person trying to point him in the right direction. But remember, this is all about the way that people who know about climate change are "enforcing the narrative"

Here's some discussion from 2014 on "The Death of Expertise. Tom Fletcher and others may like to consider some of the points raised there. Some of them are recurring themes in Tom Fletcher's tweets and retweets.

Tom Nichols: It is simply exhausting — at least speaking from my perspective as the policy expert in most of these discussions — to have to start from the very beginning of every argument and establish the merest baseline of knowledge, and then constantly to have to negotiate the rules of logical argument.

Tom Nichols: There’s also that immutable problem known as "human nature." It has a name now: it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which says, in sum, that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. And when you get invested in being aggressively dumb...well, the last thing you want to encounter are experts who disagree with you, and so you dismiss them in order to maintain your unreasonably high opinion of yourself. (There’s a lot of that loose on social media, especially.)

See the image below. He was retweeting a message from a news site that Whistler Mountain (ski resort) was opening a day early this year.

This is another example of how Tom Fletcher panders to his audience. He either is clueless about weather, climate, climate change, and science or he is very cynically pandering to his audience again. Playing on their ignornace to keep attention focussed on him. Either direction is bad but I lean toward the cynical abuse of people relying on him for some kind of journalistic commentary.